Interact or Die! (Introduction)

Introduction by Arjen Mulder and Joke Brouwer for the publication "Interact or Die!" (2007).

Interact or Die!

Interaction is a defining characteristic of every living being. Bodies and objects
build connections, form networks, and then, through interaction,
achieve organization, structure, memory and heredity. Interaction is often
seen as a process of action and reaction between already existing bodies
and objects, but this is too limited a view. Interaction causes bodies and objects
to change and variation to arise. Interaction is not a deformation of existing
forms, but rather an addition of information, an informing, a
formation of forms.

Interact or Die! is about the way in which random behavior in networks
creates strong but flexible structures and forms, without there being a central
designing coordinator or code that pushes the process into a definite direction
or form. It explores how interaction both forms and selects the
effective, functioning parts of networks and leaves the noneffective parts to
die.

An exciting concept concerning the self-organization of networks that
has come up in recent evolutionary developmental biology is that of “exploratory
behavior.” It explains how blood vessels and neural cells are always
found precisely at the spot where they are needed. This is not a process
controlled by genes alone. In an embryo, developing blood and neural cells
both grow from the top of a developing blood vessel or nerve, time and time
again, in all directions, but only the extensions that hit a relevant target (a
muscle or another nerve cell, or a tissue that needs oxygen) survive, while
the rest simply degenerate. Only those parts of the developing network that
interact live; the rest simply die.

This same process of exploratory behavior turns out to exist in many
(maybe all) different forms of network building in the living world: ants
looking for food, spam looking for a commercial response, viruses looking for
software to feed on, game communities that grow beyond their wildest
dreams, electronic works of art looking for audiences willing to interact. Exploratory
behavior is about creating as much variation as possible, and then
letting the parts of the network that function and interact select themselves,
and letting the nonworking parts degenerate.

In the 1950s, Gilbert Simondon spoke of transduction as a process – physical,
biological, mental, social or artistic – in which an activity gradually sets
itself in motion, propagating within a given area, through a structuralization
of the different zones of the area across which it operates. Simondon
gives the formation of crystals as an example. Exploratory behavior is an interactive,
living transductive process.

Clear-Cut Sloppiness

Interaction does not come into being on the basis of rigid blueprints or detailed
plans with clear-cut goals; it proceeds messily, in an exploratory, flexible
way. The results of interaction possess the same sloppiness, instability
and tentativeness – but precisely for this reason, they can last a surprisingly
long time, as they are always able to reorganize and adapt. Interactivity
is, on the one hand, a method of bringing something into being –
whether a form, a structure, an organization, a body, an institute, or a work
of art – and, on the other, a way of dealing with it.

We all know that blueprints and plans for the future have lost their
meaning: nobody can control processes like climate change or global flows
of employment, fugitives and information. What’s interesting now is what
kind of exploratory behavior we can come up with that might prove to be
viable, by creating functioning networks where these changes and flows
can interactively select themselves. Exploratory, transductive behavior is the
pragmatic approach to the possibilities and problems presented by the
process of globalization that we live in today. But it’s also the pragmatic
approach to finding a necessary – rather than random – form for interactive
electronic art installations.

The Search for a Living Art

In viewers looking at noninteractive works of art, we see exploratory and
tentative behavior. Every perception is already an action, so in fact in this
sense there is no art that is not interactive. But only art that presents itself
as interactive tries to absorb this activity of the viewer’s and make itself
open so that it, too, can change. An interactive artwork does not so much
respond to the viewer as form a double system with him or her in which
both the work and the viewer can change (unlike noninteractive art, in regard
to which it is thought that only the viewer can change). Interactive art
is an open kind of art, one that permits multiple perceptions, though not
every perception. In interactive art, perception becomes action, and the action
of perceiving adds something to the work. The act of perceiving thereby
becomes the act of making the work.

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"Interact or Die!" contains a series of interviews with leading biologists in the field of evolutionary developmental biology (“evo-devo”), with architects and art historians in the field of bioconstructivism.